Design science methodology: principles and practice

Design scientists have to balance the demands of methodological rigor that they share with purely curiosity-driven scientists, with the demands of practical utility that they share with utility-driven engineers. Balancing these conflicting demands can be conceptually complex and may lead to methodological mistakes. For example, treating a design question as an empirical research question may lead to re searcher to omit the identification of the practical problem to solve, to omit the identification of stakeholder-motivated evaluation criteria, or to omit trade-off and sensitivity analysis. This tutorial aims to clear up this methodological mist in the case of software engineering (SE) research. The core distinction is that between practical problems and knowledge questions. A practical problem is a difference between stakeholder goals and experiences, that they wish to reduce, and a knowledge question is a lack in knowledge, that they wish to reduce [14]. For example, to reduce the number of build failures in distributed SE projects is a practical problem; to ask for the relation between team communication structure and code integration build failures is a knowledge question.